From Pipelines to Refineries: Building Complex Data Applications with Apache Spark

Big data tools are challenging to combine into a larger application: ironically, big data applications themselves do not tend to scale very well. These issues of integration and data management are only magnified by increasingly large volumes of data. Apache Spark provides strong building blocks for batch processes, streams and ad-hoc interactive analysis. However, users face challenges when putting together a single coherent pipeline that could involve hundreds of transformation steps, especially when confronted by the need of rapid iterations. This talk explores these issues through the lens of functional programming. It presents an experimental framework that provides full-pipeline guarantees by introducing more laziness to Apache Spark. This framework allows transformations to be seamlessly composed and alleviates common issues, thanks to whole program checks, auto-caching, and aggressive computation parallelization and reuse.
Session hashtag: #EUdev1

Tim Hunter is a software engineer at Databricks and contributes to the Apache Spark MLlib project, as well as the GraphFrames, TensorFrames and Deep Learning Pipelines libraries. He has been building distributed Machine Learning systems with Spark since version 0.2, before Spark was an Apache Software Foundation project.

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